Is he perfect, or some savior on a white horse? No. Yet the others on the debate stage talked like angry children determined to show the world how tough they'd be. They promised to rip up the Iran deal and either push Vladimir Putin around or ignore him completely.

But Paul, the senator from Kentucky, spoke like a thoughtful grown-up, overshadowing them all on foreign policy, explaining that intervening in Middle East civil wars is a recipe for disaster.

"If you want boots on the ground, and you want them to be our sons and daughters, you've got 14 other choices," Paul said during the debate. "There will always be a Bush or Clinton for you if you want to go back to war in Iraq."

Clearly the media don't like him. And Trump doesn't like him, singling Paul out for attack at the outset.

Trump is the front-runner. So why attack Paul, who's been so starved of media oxygen? Because New Hampshire approaches, and Trump will fade eventually, having demonstrated to Americans that he lacks the requisite depth for the job.

The GOP establishment can afford a Carly Fiorina, pretending to be an outsider, or even a Marco Rubio, thrilling a few of the TV talking heads by morphing into some Leonidas of Sparta from Miami, eager to kick those insolent Persian envoys down the well.

But what the Republican establishment cannot afford is Paul as their nominee. That would expose the neocons and the war party, and the security surveillance state.

And it might help remind Americans that conservatives once opposed foreign adventures, meaning wars, because wars by definition lead to the aggrandizement of federal power.

It is the universal law of political arithmetic that as the government gorges and muscles up, individual liberty fades.

Former President George W. Bush had buzz when he plunged foolishly into Iraq and that led to the terror of ISIS. President Barack Obama had buzz, just about the time he drew that "red line" in the sands of Syria, and before the dictator in Libya was toppled.

Obama began to lose buzz with the growth of ISIS, which he dismissed as some kind of terrorist junior varsity.

The flood of refugees from North Africa and Syria —the forerunners of a larger stampede threatening Europe — has both Bush and Obama's name on it.

But you won't hear that on CNN (the Democratic network) or Fox News (the Republican network), or from other establishment Democratic or Republican candidates.

"I've made my career as being an opponent of the Iraq War," Paul said. "I was opposed to the Syria war. I was opposed to arming people who are our enemies.

"Iran is now stronger because Hussein is gone (from Iraq). Hussein was the great bulwark and counterbalance to the Iranians. So when we complain about the Iranians, you need to remember that the Iraq War made it worse …

"We have to learn sometimes the interventions backfire. The Iraq War backfired and did not help us. We're still paying the repercussions of a bad decision."

Yet it was obvious from their flexing and posturing and saber rattling that the other Republicans insist on not learning a thing from Iraq.

And so, they'd love to face Hillary Clinton. She never met a war she didn't like.

If Hillary is in the finals with Jeb! or Rubio or even Fiorina — our new Joan of Arc who talked of building warships and recruiting brigades of U.S. Marines — the Republicans will be saved from having to confront their past.

Ted Cruz is a smart man, hated of course by liberal newspeople, and I've always thought he might best serve his nation on the Supreme Court.

But in the debate, Cruz was so ostentatiously fierce about shredding the Iran agreement that he might as well have worn some leopard skin costume, a circus strongman in a Fellini movie shredding the Palermo phone book in his bare hands.

Dr. Ben Carson was reasonable but inexperienced in foreign affairs and it showed. Mike Huckabee is a nincompoop. The others pandered like pros. And the talking heads said it was wisdom.

Paul took a different tack.

"Sometimes both sides of the civil war are evil, and sometimes intervention sometimes makes us less safe," Paul said. "This is the real debate we have to have in the Middle East.

"Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam, and we're more at risk. So I think we need to think before we act, and know most interventions, if not a lot of them in the Middle East, have actually backfired on us."

There is no buzz to such rhetoric, no bloody gusto, no King Leonidas abs of steel, no Joan of Arc with a sword.

It's just grown-up talk, and so, quite likely, not entertaining at all.